by Mazlow, J.
“You’re right boy, you’re right. And you may just be smarter than I’d thought. Still, if I was you, I’d stay away from St. Louis.” She opened one of her bags and pulled out a small green fruit.
“Want some crabapples?”
“Crabapple?” I said as I took the smooth hard fruit from her hand and looked at it.
“Yeah, crabapple. I picked em off a nice tree a couple of days ago.” She pulled another out and bit into it, so I followed suit. A crisp tartness puckered my mouth, but I finished it off, pulling all the fruit off the core with my front teeth before throwing it into the stream. The wind blew in a soft but constant breeze rustling the thin leaves of a nearby willow and pushing white clouds across the sky. I reached into my pack and pulled out a slender can of anchovies, rolled back the top and held it out to the old woman now smiling at me. She pulled a couple of the fish from the can delicately and then slurped them down. Still smiling she’d said, “Young people don’t know shit.”
Sitting in the back of the truck as it flew down the highway faster than I’d ever traveled and staring the blond vampire in the face, I realized that the elderly woman had spoken the truth and now I was headed for the vampire city. Bats dive bombed the truck’s headlights and deer stood petrified in the bushes along the side of the road as we passed. I’d never ridden in any kind of car before, though when we’d been young my mother had often looked into their cabs and checked their steering columns, floorboards and behind the puffy backed mirrors that were pushed against their roofs for keys. She’d also sniff the gas tanks but even if she found keys, she’d only ever started one car. Instead she would just ramble on at our camp that night about how we could drive west to California, live on the ocean, and never walk again, except through Disneyland. As a little girl she’d dreamed of Disneyland, and begged to visit, but her parents had never taken her. The one vehicle that she’d started was a small black truck with a windshield that had been reduced to only a jagged frame sitting in an overgrown driveway. She’d sat in the cab for a long time with her head against the steering wheel and the keys dangling from the ignition, as my brother and I had jumped up and down on its gleaming plastic bed. We’d made the shocks squeak terribly but remained completely silent ourselves. Eventually she’d stopped staring at the floorboards and cranked the truck. The engine had turned and turned with a dull groaning and shook us with its chug chug motion before it had finally caught with a sputtering gleeful sound that rattled everything. It belched smoke as we leapt in its bed and shouted for joy at the ragged sound of the engine firing. It threatened now and again to quit but was growing smoother with every revolution until it backfired emitting a piercing bang that rang through the trees and my mother had almost broken the key as she turned it off. She hurried us out of the truck and didn’t halt our quick march until she felt sure no one was hunting us, ten hours later.
“So, you’re his brother then?” the blond vamp on the other side of the truck asked while the others regarded me with a bland curiosity as they fiddled with their knives, cleaning their nails. I didn’t answer, my throat felt constricted as if it had swollen shut. “So, you’re Benjamin Elderitch’s brother?” he asked again.
“I guess he’s scared shitless,” the one who had been at my feet put in. “Or he’s too stupid to know how to talk.”
I didn’t know what to do. I’d never heard of anyone talking with vampires. What had my brother done, and were they going to take it out on me? How had they found me? Despite the warm, damp air rushing by I shivered, and my teeth chattered. I tried to keep it together, tried to think of the vampires that surrounded me; the one that had questioned me watching me with a mixture of irritation, disgust and a growing anticipation, the darker one beside him looking bored, the one between me and the rattling tailgate, and two more in the cab nothing more than floating heads behind the glass, as nothing more than wild dogs, who won’t attack unless you run. But with every glimpse of their fangs and every flash of moonlight off their pistols and knives, my terror grew until it was a writhing mass barely contained. Their pale faces multiplied in my mind so that I saw them no matter where I looked, and even when I closed my eyes. I tried to stare past the m at the brush that grew along the road’s edges sending its roots probing into the cracks in the pavement and wondered if I could leap, if I would survive, or if would break my neck as I hit the ground. My questioner kicked me in the thigh, the toe of his boot digging into the meat of my thigh.
“He’s a wild, he ain’t like farm fodder. They gotta have a bit more brains to stay alive. Answer me boy, are you his brother? The one who’s stirring up all that trouble up north? You ain’t gonna talk?”
He snarled at me and got up seemingly immune to the constant bumps and jerks, stepped over to me still in a crouching position and slapped me across the cheek and the side of my nose. The blow threw my head back, only for it to recoil as it reached the length of my neck. Starbursts flared in my vision, bright yellow against the night that they momentarily masked. The vampires laughed a distant sound woven in with the roaring of the wind, but all outside of a foggy insulation barrier that seemed to surround my head.
“He’s feeling bloody again,” one of them said amongst their laughter. A deep painful pulsing started behind my watering eyes and thumped throughout my skull. I felt myself letting go, but control slipped through my grasp and I could not stop myself as warm liquid seeped down my legs, soaking into my jeans. The vampires’ laughter redoubled. I could smell the rank liquid despite the wind, and it smelled like fear made physical. Where the vamp had struck had risen above the surrounding skin in a ridge of swollen flesh that was tender and hot like sunburn and my neck felt as if it had been permanently twisted to one side. I heard one of them say, “Little baby,” but I missed the context. I closed my eyes expecting to be drained at any moment, to feel their cold fangs at my throat, slashing open my jugular, my own warm blood soaking the front of my shirt and their cold lips closing around the wound. I wondered if I would remember my human life if I awoke as a vampire. Would I remember my mother and my brother? Would I remember sitting at a wobbly table in a sleek silver trailer abandoned on some lonely back road while my mother taught us to play monopoly, wondering why anyone would pay for one of the thousands of worn out, moldy, decrepit houses that we’d slept in? Would I drink the blood of humans and would I comprehend what I was doing, or would I be like a dog that gnaws at a corpse with no sense of right and wrong? Would I drain people even if I did not comprehend my actions, compelled by instinct despite a lingering sense of shame and guilt?
“I guess,” I croaked, hoping they would not hit me again, my throat dry, despite the snot that ran from my nostrils and the tears leaking from between my squeezed shut eyes.
“He can speak,” the one that had struck me said. “You’ve just got to loosen their tongues a bit. Although nothing is more effective then flame if you’ve gone it.”
The truck shifted and I opened my eyes when I felt him step away from me. He sat down on the other side of the truck again.
“But I haven’t seen him in years,” I continued. My urine trickled down my pants’ legs from the puddle that had gathered at my crotch. Everything continued to tilt and oscillate from the blow and dart’s drug. A smidgen of blood leaked from one corner of my lips. I licked it under the intense scrutiny of my captors, their pale faces leering at me. I drew my knees up to my chest despite the flow of the trapped liquid that it caused, wrapping my arms around my knees. A dim ringing in my ears did not seem to be abating. There was silence except for a tinny unintelligible voice that leaked from the truck’s cab, barely perceptible over the wind. My eyes grew wide as I spotted a yellow glow in the distance as if hundreds of fires were burning off to our north east.
Following my gaze, the blond said, “We’ll be in good ol’ suck city St. Louis soon enough. Then the General can decide whether or not he believes you. Either way you’ll probably end up as somebody’s tasty treat.” His eyes brightened. “I haven’t tasted wild blood in a lo
ng time.”
“You like that city too much,” the vamp at the tailgate said. “Pretty soon you’ll just be another soft bastard living off farmed blood.”
“Oh, shut up.” A momentary silence fell over the group in which I concentrated on breathing in deeply and out slowly as the pain in my head fell to a dull ache. The blond’s burst of violence had faded and with it his interest in me.
“I was born in St. Louis,” he said. “I’ve lived here my entire life, if you want to call it that.” The other vampires were looking away from him, their eyes had glazed over, and their jaws gone slack. He stared into distances of both space and time as he spoke; looking right through me, over the wide white road we drove down and beyond the countryside behind me. Automobiles of all types littered the shoulders of the highway, most sitting on rusting axles, or on flattened tires cracked and dried from baking in the summer heat, but the road’s lanes had been cleared. In many places the cars had been simply pushed off the road into ditches or piled together so that a man could scarcely walk between them. Here and there all that remained of a stretch of cars were their blackened burnt out husks, metal burnt to a golden stripped sheen, and their plastic interiors melted into hills and valleys that looked as if they’d been shaped by the rain. Overhead the stars had dimmed somewhat, and wispy clouds floated here and there, but I could still see a broad expanse of the night sky, and the stars told me that we were moving northeast at a fast clip.
The vampire continued speaking though no one listened, he didn’t seem to be speaking to anyone in particular but at the same time he didn’t seem to talk to himself either. Instead the cadence of his voice suggested that he was speaking by rote, repeating words he’d spoken many times before, words that he felt compelled to repeat again and again as some sort of reassuring mantra.
“I went to St. Louis University High. Shit, those were the days. If I’d have known then what I know now, hell, if I’d have known that then I’d have shit my pants and I’d still have no idea what to do. All I mean is those days were something. Had me a thunderbird. Dad told me I could get whatever car I wanted as long as I paid for it myself and I did. I mowed grass, roofed, shoveled snow. I did it all and then some, but it was worth it when I came blowing into that hot dusty parking lot in august, engine roaring and tires skidding. Damn, you’ve got to be a Sir to maintain a car like that these days, not enough mechanics around. Got a girl that year too, Jenny was her name. Curly blonde hair and red pouting lips. Back then it was exciting just to sit in the car and kiss her. That didn’t last long.” He chuckled weakly his eyes crinkling. “I married her straight out of high school and went to work at the Bud plant. You can’t even find Budweiser around here anymore. It’s all cleaned out except for maybe a hidden stash stewing in some musty fridge somewhere. Dad didn’t want me to get married, didn’t want me to work at the plant. I told him I didn’t have the grades to go to college, but he was adamant that I could have at least gone to community college or become a welder or something. I needed cash though. Jenny got pregnant right away. Everything was so rushed. It seemed to rush right up to our baby girl’s second birthday and then it settled down into a boring rhythm. Day after day I drove a forklift loading trucks with kegs, the creak of the shocks as the lift dropped onto the trailer and that flat sound of its metal wheels on the wooden floorboards were my soundtrack. There was beer at work and then more beer at home. It wasn’t so bad now that I think about it, but it sure wore you down.”
That’s when the crazy times began. The news didn’t know what to make of it, terrorism, or disease. A disease that allows you to live forever. Then the infighting began amongst the army. Mom and dad packed up their RV and got out of town. I haven’t seen em since. Jenny and I stayed. We needed the money. I had to work as long as I could. I was one of the few to stay at the Bud plant till the end. Me and this one guy who brewed his own beer and kept saying he was going to open his brewery one day, we sat at lunch smoking and saying the same old shit I’d always made fun of my parents and grandparents for saying a thousand times before. All that nonsense about the world going crazy and how times were worse, and people were eviler than they’d been when we’d been growing up, except this time it turned out we were right. I called Jenny at the end of that break and she’d said the baby wouldn’t take its nap. That’s all I remember of our last conversation. Then I went in and loaded up a truck that never got delivered.”
He looked up at me. “You know I went back to that truck for beer later. It’s cashed now.” Shaking his head, he continued. “The first gang struck St. Louis that afternoon. You think we’re bad.” He laughed. “Imagine twenty vampires, some with automatic weapons, some buck naked, running through the streets taking orders from no one, feeding rampantly. It was like one of those sharks shows on the Discovery channel. They literally just ran up and down the streets tackling people and ripping their throats out. The radio was blaring nothing but emergency broadcasts. ‘Gangs of terrorists have been sighted in the St. Louis area. They are armed and dangerous. Shelter indoors. Lock all doors and windows.’ The local news started calling us vampires for the first time. Vampires. I don’t know why we call ourselves that. Hell, I could eat garlic right now if I wanted to. That’s the kind of crap I heard on the radio as I sat in bumper to bumper traffic laying on the horn and trying to get home. Cars had already tried to drive up the medians and the sidewalks clogging up everything. People were abandoning their cars, so I got out and jogged home. I didn’t see any vampires, but I did see burning cars and corpses lying on the streets, some twitching and slobbering. When I got there, they were both dead. Well hell, Jenny was lying on the floor with a one hundr3ed and five-degree fever red as a beet and shivering when I arrived. She was barely breathing, and she wouldn’t answer. No one picked up when I called 911 and she died soon after, her head on my lap, my tears falling onto her face. I hope that they were cool. She was as hot as an oven. She didn’t turn though. A whole eternity with her curls, blue eyes, and red lips I could have handled, but I guess I should be thankful she didn’t come back as a thrall with no recollection of what we’d had. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t have liked this life; sometimes it’s more boring than the day in day out of family life.”
I didn’t feel much after that, I just wandered around in a daze thinking I might join my parents out in the countryside, but I never made it. Naïve as I was, I went back to find my car. That’s when I was caught by a skinny, raggedy haired female vampire with crazy eyes. I saw her in the side mirror of a mini-van bolting for me, her teeth bared and her ripped clothing and blood-stained hair flying back in the wind. I ran but she was so quick, flying across the ground like Superman. She knocked me to the ground with an elbow to my back and held my head against the pavement. Her hand was like a steel beam against the back of my skull, not budging against my desperate flailing. She drained me. Everything went flat as if it had been emptied out, and gray as if everything were covered with a thin layer of ash. I could hear several alarms going off to no effect. I lay there on the sidewalk and it rained on me as I shivered. Visions came and went, voices called and receded until I awoke, turned, transformed. I was still cold, but it felt natural, as if my body would be unable to hold any more heat. I was weak and thirsty. I had turned.”
I went back to the Bud factory. It was the only place I could think to go other than my home, where my wife and baby were lying on the floor dead. I drank a couple of beers and wandered around; my thirst not slackened. The lights were still on, but it was empty, just this giant, desolate warehouse filled with kegs and forklifts. That was how I spent my first night as a vampire.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, then you Drank and now everything is hunky dory, so shut up about it already,” the vampire at the tailgate interjected. “You think this guy wants to hear it.”
He went on, ignoring the outburst. “I could have gone to the Grand Canyon. Hell, I could have gone to Europe, but I just stayed in St. Louis like I always had.”
During his tale I’d
slowly shifted a few times, stretching my legs, and then drawing them back up to my chest. Sweat poured down my face but dried in the wind just as quickly. The roadside was even more crowded with cars, their hoods thrown open, discarded parts rusting beside them, and all their gas tanks open. No trees had managed to take root in between them, only grass and some withered wildflowers. I settled with my feet flat on the bed of the truck watching the vampire as he’d told his story. His thin pale face and his blue eyes all moved as if in slow motion as if he were slowly digesting every word that he spoke. It all seemed out of sync with his identity as my captor, a vampire who no doubt wanted to drain me and throw my body out of the truck, who would more than likely drain me before night was through. I glanced at the other vamps out of the corner of my eye. They all sat slumped, bored, and taking scant notice of me, as if I weren’t worth bothering with. Even so my heart fluttered in my neck as I looked at them and I struggled to keep my body from shaking. I could feel their fangs at my throat and all I could think of was my death, or worse my undeath, unable to escape this world and pass into the next. If a vampire dies it is condemned to the lake of fire for all eternity. I lay my hands at my sides, palms pressed against the truck bed and then pushing with my feet and my hands flipped over the side of the truck, a wide-eyed realization dawning on the tan vampire across from me that turned into a scowl as I fell backwards. He leapt across the truck, but I was already out in the night air that whooshed by as the truck rushed on. It seemed as if I hung in a vast black space populated only by myself and the truck, all knowledge of the ground lost. I heard someone say, “son of a bitch,” followed by the thud of fists at the rattling of glass in its frame as someone else yelled. “Stop! That little bastards jumped out.”
My curled body slammed into the hard pavement, hot white light shattering my vision and then I was rolling along the asphalt stones and branches digging into my skin. My teeth cut into my lips and my ears started ringing in a deep ominous tone as my head hit the pavement. Just down the road tires screeched. Bullets whined as they ricocheted off the pavement behind me. The gunshots sounded distant through the crashing of my body against the road and the ringing in my ears. The ground pounded me on all sides as I rolled, as if I were being punched repeatedly by a circle of men. I rolled off the pavement, my ankles slamming into the side of an abandoned car twisting my body’s path, and then I rolled through a patch of jagged gravel, down a short incline through some tall sticky weeds and slammed into a small tree, my body curling around it with the impact. I sat up coughing and wiping the blood that was flowing from my nose and down across my swollen tender lips. Gray flecks of grit stung in the abrasions that ran across both of my elbows and down one side of my stomach. A mixture of clear liquid and blood oozed slowly from the raw flesh. Boots rang on the pavement and I got up shakily bending the little tree as I pulled myself up. One of my eyes was beginning to swell closed and I could only keep it open enough to squint. I ran hobbling as best I could crashing through the brush and weeds, down a bank that sloped gently away from the highway. Behind me shouts rang out and I imagined the vampires following my bloodstains to the crushed weeds where I’d rolled off the highway. An acute pain flared in my knee with every step and my breath came in harsh, ragged gasps that sounded like rocks being drug across sheet metal. I held my hand across my mouth hoping to dull the sound. I could hear the vampires leaving the highway and crashing through the brush almost as loudly as a human being moving fairly quickly would have, the vamps must have been rushing. I slowed down taking deep breaths and stepped easily choosing my path more carefully. My pants had ripped at the knees and hung in shreds allowing branches to prod and painfully drag across the road rash beneath them. The sound of the vampires’ movements disappeared, and panic welled up from my chest as I tried to look in every direction at once as I walked. My heart beat harder than ever before and the intense urge to flee, to sprint as hard as I could away from the highway and the truck that sat upon it almost swept away my reason with its strength but the racket would have certainly brought them back down upon me. If I let my fear get the best of me then they would capture me again, take me to their vampire city and drain me, or give me to their leader, this general who would drain me himself as a special treat. I could see them gathered around me in the darkness, pale faces with a slight waxy sheen, fangs gleaming in the moonlight as they leaned in and I struggled futilely against their cold wiry grips restraining my limbs. Then I imagined myself crouched over my own victim, the limp body of an emaciated man hanging from my arms in an ungraceful arc as I sucked blood from his neck and my mother watched from the shadows, red faced with the thrall sickness and muttering to herself. I wiped blood from my nose and lips onto my sleeve. I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t become one of them, I had to escape. I prayed for my pistol so that I could shoot myself, so that I could spare myself, but the vampires must have taken it while I was under the effects of their sedative. How could my brother be involved in this, had he already been turned and requested to feed upon me as part of some cruel initiation rite, or was it all a ruse? It didn’t make any sense. He had to have turned, else how could he be associating with vampires. The image of my brother as a vampire loomed overwhelmingly in my mind. A wan man, very thin, lazing about by day, hunting by night. It scared me. My brother had been a cruel and unfeeling human, as a vampire he was sure to be ten times worse. Perhaps the trouble that he was causing for the vampires was this hunt for me, this desire to turn me, or drain and torment me.